Over 11,000 veterans who received routine colonoscopies at three VA health centers are being warned to get blood tests for HIV, hepatitis, and other malignant viral infections in the wake of revelations that government-employed clinic staffers frequently neglected to sterilize the equipment between procedures.
Patients at the Veterans Affairs health centers in question — 3,260 in Miami (FL), 1,800 in Augusta (GA), and 6,400 in Murfreesboro (TN) — may have been exposed to “potentially infectious fluids,” according to the VA.
The fact that this is due to negligence on the part of the government-employed hospital staff is bad enough on its own, of course — but it gets worse, as some of those may have been infected with HIV or hepatitis as many as six years ago, and are just now being alerted about their possible infection and encouraged to get tested. (Thankfully for these folks, some Members of Congress who were concerned about their electoral viability in 2010 managed to talk President Obama out of charging them for the follow-up tests and treatment made necessary by gross negligence on the part of government-employed health care workers.)
Patients who underwent the procedure at the Murfreesboro, TN facility as long ago as April 23, 2003 may be at risk, according to the VA, while Miami patients could have been contaminated as far back as May 2004. The Augusta exposures appear to have been limited to a period of “11 months last year.”
“What if you had to worry about giving your wife AIDS?” said Wayne Craig, a 52-year-old U.S. Navy veteran who lives in Elora and had a colonoscopy at the VA’s Alvin C. York Medical Center in Murfreesboro, near Nashville, about five years ago. “Why haven’t I been notified within five years?”
That’s a good question. Another good question is, with issues like this and like the infamous Building 18 at Walter Reed, why in the world are so many still conducting a full-court press for handing over responsibility and care for the rest of the American population to the same government bureaucrats who run places like these?
KnightsofMalta
Dan Spencer
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
Dan McLaughlin
Caleb Howe
People are, as you say,
USNJIMRET (Diary) Wednesday, April 1st at 9:58AM EST (link)“conducting a full-court press for handing over responsibility and care for the rest of the American population” because they act as if nothing ever goes wrong with anything the government ‘runs’.
Even though, regardless of who’s in “power”, the history of government “runs” enterprise is chapter after chapter of precisely this kind of incompetence, ineptitude and, worse of all IMO, abject failure to prosecute the guilty.
But, when even so called “republicans” are now spewing the National Health Care mantra….what chance that the concept will die the quick and painless death it deserves?
Oops!
fishbreath (Diary) Wednesday, April 1st at 10:11AM EST (link)I have a couple of friends who are doctors. I expect mentioning this story and ‘malpractice’ in the same word would make them cringe in sympathetic financial pain.
Oh, wait. These are government employees. They can make mistakes and someone else will eat the cost.
It's not the physicians that should be held responsible
mom2oneson (Diary) Wednesday, April 1st at 10:28AM EST (link)but the OR managers. The physicians aren’t involved in clean up and set up.
Nothing quite so exhilarating...
TXCHLInstructor Wednesday, April 1st at 1:51PM EST (link)… as to be shot at, and missed.
I had my first colonoscopy about 18 months ago. At the VA Medical Center.
In Dallas. (whew!)
That was shortly after they got fingered in a government audit for running one of the dirtiest hospitals in the VA system, which meant that they were on their very best behavior at the time. So I have some hope that I won’t be on one of those lists…
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